


wings

by ghostofcepheus



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chest Binding, M/M, Wingfic, anxiety mention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 15:27:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4310511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostofcepheus/pseuds/ghostofcepheus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Kenma wakes up to the soft filtering of the morning sun through his windows, he feels mentally disarrayed and physically disgusted from waking up in dried sweat. Feeling the walls as support, Kenma sluggishly steps into the bathroom and turns on the shower. As he was waiting for the water to heat up, Kenma tosses his shirt off and slips off his pajama bottoms when a flash of white catches his eyes.</p><p>Before his eyes, attached to his shoulder bones are two small tufts of feathers wiggling hello.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wings

**Author's Note:**

> “You were born with potential.  
> You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness.  
> You were born with wings.  
> You are not meant for crawling, so don't.  
> You have wings.  
> Learn to use them and fly.”  
> ― Rumi

Kenma couldn’t sleep.

No matter how many times he flopped over onto his stomach, shifted his sheets around bed--before inevitably kicking it off in frustration, or counted the imaginary stars in his head, it has been 2 hours and 48 minutes utterly wasted in trying to fall asleep.

It was not that perhaps he did not need to sleep at the moment. No, in fact, his eyelids were lead bearing his face down into the comfort of his pillow and his feet sore from the extended volleyball practice to prepare for the upcoming summer volleyball bootcamp, and there was nothing else Kenma wanted to do in the world other than catch some shut eye before the early morning practice in a few hours.

Instead, he couldn’t shake off the dull ache throbbing in the middle of his back.

The pain began early in the evening while Kenma took a shower, initially feeling like a prick of a needle dipping into his back and made his skin feel blistering hot even when the water was set to lukewarm. When he first lays down in his bed, he feels like he's lying on a battery.

Feeling a mixture of annoyance and defeat, Kenma sat up in his bed and rubbed at the spot for the umpteenth time and sighed.

He wakes up cranky and tired, but the pain is gone. When he rushes to get dressed and leave the house, he forgets all about last night.

It isn't until a week later that the pain comes back and back in an eye-piercing, bone-twisting, agony fury.

This time it is utterly impossible for Kenma to even consider laying on his side, and has been stuck sitting up with his back supported by an abundant amount of pillows with a deathly grip on a pillow to silence his cries into.

His muscles are boiling liquid goo that made him sweat profusely, and he bites his lips when he felt his bones shift. He doesn't need to know that his bones are moving out of place, and he doesn't understand what is going on with his body to make him feel this way. Nail marks decorates the flesh on his legs from gripping onto the skin whenever tides of paralyzing pain crash into him.

His bones, his own bones were moving, jutting through the muscle to form a bridge towards the skin.

Kenma lets out a shuddery breath and wiped his tear-stained face with his hand, and he willed himself forward to grab the can of gel heat rub snatched from his parents’ room earlier this week. Kenma scooped a copious amount that was over the amount that was recommended-- at this point, the medical researchers at Icy Hot’s company could kiss Kenma’s ass for all he cared-- and exhaled shakily as he gingerly applies the rub to his back.

He pants as the pain gradually lessens after the addition of many more scoops; the gut-squeezing ache in his bones, however, never leaves.

When Kenma wakes up to the soft filtering of the morning sun through his windows, he felt mentally disarrayed and physically disgusted from waking up in dried sweat. Feeling the walls as support, Kenma sluggishly steps into the bathroom and turns on the shower. As he was waiting for the water to heat up, Kenma tossed his shirt off and slipping off his pajama bottoms when a flash of white caught his eyes.

And before his eyes, attached to his shoulder bones are two small tufts of feathers wiggling hello.

* * *

In his first grade art class, he remembers being told to draw a self-portrait of himself, and when everyone was done, they all go up in front of the class and show the portrait they made. Kenma remembers his standing out the most, be cause not only did he drew himself, but he drew himself with wings. He remembers being obsessed with stories of mythical griffins and gentle pegasi, surrounding himself by stacks of library books and escapes reality by reading all of them. When he hears his parents argue, he would close his eyes and pretend he was one of them, flying away to go on a heroic adventure and not having to be bounded by the earth.

When these memories come back to Kenma as he stares at himself in the mirror, he wants to laugh at the irony and how he doesn't want anything more than to get rid of the wings growing out of his back right now.

In the first few days after the appearance of the tufts of feather, Kenma attended class with thick undershirts under his school uniform to keep the newly born feathers from moving about. When it came to Thursday’s calculus test combined with Kenma’s test anxiety, undershirts proved to not be enough to keep the feathers from flapping together.

In fact, when it came to Kenma ordering from cafés to talking to his teammates, he noticed his wings seemed to react to every emotion on the human spectrum; the more intense Kenma’s emotions, the more intense and spastic were the wings.

And as the cherry on top, his wings never ceased to grow. Kenma gripped the edge of the sink in dread every morning as he witnessed his wings grow from the size of his hands to the length of his forearm. Within a week or two, Kenma began digging through his father’s closet were out for bigger shirts that could conceal any flutters or outlines that majority of his closet failed to do so. The bigger his wings seemed to get, the worse Kenma performed during practice and school, and the more terrified Kenma was that somebody would notice the slender outline of feathers against his shirts.

The worst came during volleyball practice.

Kenma jumped every time someone would talk to him whether it was a simple question like “hey, do you want water?” or calling his name, and the new limbs on his back seemed to suck all of the concentration out of him during games. He jumped less in morbid fear that he would somehow float and fly away if he jumped too high, and ran slower because of how difficult it was to carry extra weight on his back. He was always the last one to practice and the first to flee the gym, refusing to even consider what would happen if he were to change in the locker rooms. Just carrying the wings seemed to drain all of energy out of Kenma and leave him brimmed with fatigue, an overactive head full of panic, and buzzing anxiety.

It was Friday afternoon, and the sun was setting on yet another evening of gruesome practice, and Kenma didn’t pack his gear in time to avoid Kuroo cornering him. 

“Hey, are you alright? You haven’t been responding to any of my calls or messages lately.” The wings slapped hard against Kenma’s back when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Kenma tried to swallow his racing heart back down, because oh right, he’s too terrified in telling his own best friend what has been going in his own body. In fact, this is the first time since he first began growing feathers that he wasn’t able to avoid the black-haired captain.

Kenma mumbled out an incoherent jumble of mess mixed in with “bad anxiety medication” and looked down,  his back trembling with guilt.

He was nowhere mentally prepared to tell his own best friend something he didn’t even understand. All the time in the world searching on search engines and in libraries skimming books would not be able to tell Kenma exactly how in the world could a human grow wings, and if Kenma didn’t understand what was wrong with his own body, how could he ever be able to tell Kuroo? 

_This is not normal. This is not normal. I am not normal._

Panic and fear seemed to even follow Kenma in his dreams that although some dreams--being sold to a circus and on display as the world’s number one ‘freakshow’ took the cream of the crop-- were extremely absurd, they reinforced the condescending, overly harsh opinions Kenma had of himself and disintegrated the little self confidence and peace of mind he had to begin with to tiny bits of sawdust.  

_I’m a shell. An empty, hollow shell._

His thoughts replay over and over inside his head, and that night he walks alone to a store a few blocks down. Kenma swallows at the thick lump forming in his throat and clutched tightly onto the black chest binder in his hands as he shuffled his feet forward to the cashier.

“I would like to buy this please.”

* * *

Somehow Kenma gets through the first three consecutive summer camp days filled with volleyball with less agony and dread from the previous months. Thanks to heat rubs and his chest binder--it took him a few tries and online tutorial videos to wrap it properly, his wings seemed to fidget and ache less; regardless, Kenma looked forward to nothing more than unwinding his binder and letting his wings breath near the end of excessive rounds of jumping and running.

The amount of people here still makes Kenma want to vomit; the more people means that there were more eyes that could possibly notice the abnormal twitches on his back, and the more people mean the bigger the reaction if someone found out. He doesn't look up to see if a certain orange-haired boy is there, and the only person he somehow manages to hold a strained conversation longer than a few seconds is with Kuroo. 

By the end of the fourth day, Kenma's back is burning and he feels the binder cutting into his skin, but he takes his time stowing away the nets and pushing the ball cart into the storage room as he waits for everyone to file out of the locker room.

Once Kenma reached the locker room, he plops down onto the bench. Comforted  by the emptiness and silence in the room, he pulls off his shirt and gently unravels the cloth around his chest. He feels the thin expanses of ivory feathers shudder and stretch out sluggishly, as if being locked in a dark cage completely rid of any memory on how to move at all. He rolled his shoulders back, and his wings stretched forward, popping as they released the tension in his sore muscles.

He freezes when he hears a bath stall door creak open, and suddenly he feels everything spinning to a stop when he hears, “oh, it’s you Kenm--”

Kenma springs up and spins around to face a wide-eyed gaping Hinata.

* * *

Ever since Kenma was a kid, he always kept to himself and was never one to easily open up his shell to people. It made him feel too vulnerable--his worse fear was having a person he cherished being repulsed by all the thoughts and secrets he held away from the eyes of others.

Now, as he clenched his eyes shut and and finds it exceedingly difficult to not succumb and cry all the mortification and self-detestation that built up the past month, his worst fear takes a turn into reality.

“Holy--” Hinata reeled back against the wall, voice trembling as hard as Kenma’s wings. Kenma inched backward, backward until there was no where else he could run to and hide the abnormality on his backs and vomit all the energy from his buzzing nerves.

“It’s… it’s  not what you think!” Kenma didn’t know whether to smack his head or laugh, because what else could wings look like?

“Kenma, what-- you-- there are--!” Hinata choked the words out, and pointed a shaky finger at the pair of rustling limbs of feathers on Kenma’s back.

“I’ll call 911!” Hinata scrambled for his phone. “Yes, m-m-my friend--,” Hinata stammered before Kenma lunged forward  and wrestled him away from his phone. Panic flooded his throat, and his head felt as if he banged it against the ground. Kenma’s wings were now violently flapping and beating against Kenma’s back as if desperate to fly Kenma away.

“Please don’t tell anyone!” Kenma forced his hands over the sputtering orange-haired boy’s mouth and maneuvered the both of them down onto the benches.

After minutes passed of Kenma reteaching Hinata how to exhale and inhale--and reteaching himself at the same time, Hinata seemed to settle down and blinked with brown-eyed uncertainty and disbelief at Kenma.

When Kenma slowly removes his hands from Hinata’s mouth, he half-expected for Hinata to jolt away and begin another round of hysteria, and was relieved when Hinata sat still, gripping the edges of the bench as he blinked and stared hard at Kenma. His mouth moved clumsily to whisper softly.

“You have wings...”

**Author's Note:**

> i decided to split this into two parts; the second part should be posted in a week or two 
> 
> i'm also on tumblr (same url) so don't be afraid to come and talk to me


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